Business, political, and military strategists can benefit by understanding the social-cultural factors that define and influence a geographic region in which important operations occur. Although strategists may have access to vast quantities of social-cultural information, unfamiliarity with the local customs, behaviors, and beliefs can make it rather challenging and time-consuming for strategists to interpret the information. Moreover, strategists and analysts often face inherent complexities and disparities within the information, especially in merging information from different sources where the same concepts or events may be reported using different and contextually dependent terminology.
Concerning the military, social-cultural challenges and irregular warfare have changed the key aspects of how military forces execute wars. It may no longer be sufficient for military forces to execute a kinetic war with precision weapons and persistent surveillance. Military forces must also understand and win over the local population within areas of operations. In particular, military forces and strategists must understand the social-cultural dispositions of local populations to try and improve relations and gain support and influence among the people. As an example, military forces must understand the local hierarchy, family structure, tribal structure, and business relationships of a village in order to effectively exercise local influence.
Strategists face the uncertainty of how best to characterize social-cultural information because of their unfamiliarity and incomplete understanding of social-cultural factors that influence and define a region. Moreover, when information is available, it is often dispersed among multiple data stores which may be organized in a number of different ways (such as one or more ontologies described below). In order to form useful composite pictures, strategists and analysts commonly resort to labor intensive and time-consuming review and manual fusion of the data. However, this can hinder an information consumer's strategic need and/or preference for real-time (or as close as possible to real-time) situational awareness, especially in dynamically evolving environments.
An ontology is a structured representation of knowledge as a set of concepts and relationships between the concepts. Ontologies are used to describe, analyze, and gain an understanding of knowledge, typically within a domain. As by way of a non-limiting example, a domain can include a social-cultural domain used to describe local populations within a geographic area (or even different local populations, cultures, and beliefs within a larger geographic context, operational theatre, or country). There can be multiple ontologies which describe a domain generated by disparate sources and organizations. Ontologies can be aligned to attempt to synthesize and merge ontological data from these multiple data sources. However, the process is often defined by labor-intensive, time-consuming brute-force methods and in some cases, may even be wrought by trial and error, making it difficult for strategists and analysts (and other information consumers) to form a reliable composite picture.